Profile

Emily is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working on the Helping Handwriting Shine project. In this position she is reponsible for training primary school teaching staff to deliver a handwriting intervention to Year 2 and 5 pupils and supporting them in their delivery. She also acts as the Lead Admin for the project's website.

Prior to her position at the University of Leeds, Emily completed her BSc, MRes, and PhD in Psychology at the University of Manchester in the time perception lab, Time Lab Manchester. Alongside her academic work, which was funded by the ESRC and a prestigious President's Doctoral Scholar award, she held the position of Widening Participation Fellow and received a Best Contribution to Society award for her extensive outreach work.

Research interests

Increasing educational outcomes in children – The outreach work I completed as a Widening Participation Fellow sparked an interest in the ways in which children's attainment can be improved. The Helping Handwriting Shine project hopes to increase the attainment of slow and effortful handwriters by making writing more automatic, thus freeing up cognitive resources which can be used to focus on the composition of the text.

Time perception, information processing – I am interested in following up on previous work which investigated the relationship between our perceptions of time and the speed at which we can process information. The two are anecdotally related in emergency situations, but it is unclear whether they are related in the absence of high adrenaline.

Video games and click trains – A train of auditory click noises is known to increase estimates of time. Click trains also increase the speed at which we process information and respond to stimuli. I am interested in how these cognitive gains might be used to our benefit when playing reaction time style games.